Another week gone so fast - I have been flat out mining all week except for some of the weekend when Lyn was here. We put on a bbq on Sat night when some miners came over for dinner - it is great to get together and have a chat over a beer or two when opal is not the main topic - family, football and fuel prices being the usual talking points. There are a number of different nationalities here on this field and it is like a meeting of the united nations when we all get together but this time we Aussies outnumbered them with only one from Italy and one from Germany - what great company they are.

I have been wanting to get on and explain my mining programme and guess now is as good a time as any but where to start! There are two main methods used here at Koroit as on most fields - open cut and underground. Underground is where the miner works underground using a jackhammer or digger and moving dirt to the top via a hoist or blower ( giant vacuum cleaner ) into a truck and then moving to a mulloch heap - I will not go into the details too much because this is definitely not my game - doing the rabbit thing is not my idea of a good time.

Open cut mining is the only way for me - this is done using an excavator to remove dirt and a truck to move dirt to the mulloch dumps. The ideal scenario is to be taking the dirt out of one side of the hole and after removing the opal bearing nuts dumping the dirt back into the other side of the hole already mined - filling behind as you go. It sounds simple but it most certainly isn't because the dirt you take out just does not fit back into the same area - the overburden or mulloch is the biggest problem for the open cut miner and I would spend a third or more of every day moving mulloch. The biggest challenge is to organise this from the start so that mulloch does not have to be shifted a number of times. There has not been a lot of previous work done on these leases so I spent most of last year trying to organise the hole so that I could dispose of the mulloch as simply as possible - I don't doubt for a minute that it will eventually catch up but hopefully I will get a number of years before this happens. There are plenty of miners who have moved onto leases that have been worked haphazardly with great heaps of dirt everywhere and they have great difficulty trying to work out which ground has been worked and more importantly which is virgin ground.

The name of the game is to find the levels of ironstone nuts or boulders containing opal and this can be the same as the proverbial needle in the haystack scenario. Fortunately we have reasonably modern methods to narrow things down a bit - the main one being an exploratory auger drill. We are very fortunate to have a nine inch drill here on the field so this method is used by most miners frequently - it doesn't always find opal, in fact I have had many holes drilled here and have found colour in only a couple but the information it gives on where the levels of nuts are is invaluable.

At present I am mining from the surface down to a depth of about 18 feet or 6 metres approx. There are a number of levels of ironstone nuts starting from virtually under the surface to 6 feet then another main level at about 12 feet but the levels differ greatly at times so every bucket has to be processed so as to not miss any nuts - patience is the key in this game and it is always in the back of your mind that the nut you miss could be the one you have been looking for all day. The presence of natural faults in the ground play a major role in what is happening with the levels and I will endeavour to explain this as time goes on.

The results this week were ordinary after a couple of good weeks previously but a couple of buyers came by so I was able to sell what rough or unprocessed material I had on hand. The stone has been very dry but I know I am heading toward more promising ground - it is just a matter of moving the dirt. Hopefully I will have some rough opal to show next week and will explain my processing procedure.

Images show a great sunset we had this week, the gang we had for dinner, Lyn breaking nuts and the hole where I am working at present.